Friday, March 29, 2024

Clinton-Kaine Education Views Might Make You Rethink Public School

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

We know what Hillary Clinton wants for public K-12 education. She wants universal government preschool, despite the well-documented failure of government preschool to deliver even a fraction of what the Hillaryites promise. She wants federal “education SWAT teams” to “help” struggling schools (that idea creates interesting visuals). She wants more federal control over school discipline to enforce “school climates” of which she approves. And all education should be geared toward a sweeping, centralized, government-controlled system of workforce-development.

We probably won’t hear much from Clinton about Common Core, given that (as Missouri Education Watchdog reports), the leaked emails of the Democratic National Committee advise avoiding the subject as a “political third rail.” But even though she bemoans the controversy surrounding Common Core, she endorses the idea of the national standards as a means to control the “most important non-family enterprise” society engages in (take that, you intrusive parents!) – not surprising, since much of her professional life, at least the part not devoted to suppressing bimbo eruptions or selling national security to the highest bidder, has involved laying the groundwork for Common Core.

Clinton’s vice-presidential choice, former Virginia governor and current U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, actually is less tainted by Common Core than is his Republican vice-presidential counterpart. While Trump’s VP pick, Governor Mike Pence, ensured the national standards were retained in Indiana despite intense opposition, Kaine had already left the governor’s office before the Common Core decision had to be made (his successor, Governor Bob McDonnell, was one of the few governors to reject the national standards, so Virginia – at least theoretically – operates outside of Common Core).

But all other information about Kaine’s position on education indicates he and Hillary are soulmates. Education Week reports that Kaine is a champion of the workforce-development theory of education, ensuring as a senator that the statist new Every Student Succeeds Act includes career and technical education (CTE) as a “core” subject. Also, the centerpiece of his proposals on education when he ran for governor was to install universal government preschool for all Virginia four-year-olds (fortunately for all Virginia four-year-olds, that program was never implemented, although the National Education Association did praise Kaine for having “expanded pre-kindergarten”).

[…]

Read the full article at Conservative Review.

Emmett McGroarty is the American Principles Project’s Director of Education. Jane Robbins is an attorney and a senior fellow with the American Principles Project.

More From The Pulse